A shelf of PlayStation 2 games, now in the browser

Open these two first

Gran Turismo 4 arrived in Japan at the end of 2004 and everywhere else in early 2005, and it felt like Polyphony had tried to fit a whole car culture on one disc. The license tests were still the actual tutorial. The car list ran into the hundreds. Photo mode was the feature people used: park a Skyline under a tree, fuss with the shutter, and come away with a shot that looked like it belonged in a magazine. B-spec let you sit in the pits and call a race if you were tired of doing the laps yourself. It was the last numbered Gran Turismo on the PS2, and for a lot of players it stayed the one they meant when they said the name.

Resident Evil 4 had already landed on the GameCube in January 2005 and changed how a third-person game was allowed to feel. The camera sat over Leon's shoulder. The village did not play like the old fixed-camera mansions. Aiming mattered. The PlayStation 2 version followed that October, and that is the edition listed here. Capcom put Separate Ways on the disc, a second campaign as Ada Wong that runs alongside Leon's and was new for the PS2. Same merchant, same village, a hookshot, and a clearer look at what Ada was doing when she stepped out of the cutscenes. If you played RE4 on a PlayStation 2, this is the copy you had.

The weird Resident Evil

Resident Evil Outbreak and File #2 are the strange pair in this batch, and they earn the space. Outbreak came out in Japan at the end of 2003 and in the US the next spring. It was Resident Evil as a co-op scenario, up to four people, and it wanted the PlayStation 2 network adapter in a lot of living rooms that never had one plugged in. The scenarios were short, mean, and built around everybody else panicking. File #2 followed in 2004 with another set of them. Official online did not last long. Opening either one in a browser now is a strange loop back to a game that was waiting on hardware a lot of people had not bought yet. Both start at outbreakweb.com, on their own pages.

Fighters, and one brawler

Tekken 4 in 2002 was the awkward one. Namco added walls and uneven floors, pushed Jin's story hard, and a lot of longtime players bounced off it. Tekken 5 in 2005 felt like the correction. The stages opened back up, the roster swelled, and the arcade history mode let you boot the older Tekkens from inside the new game. Devil Within was there if you wanted the odd side story. Tekken: Dark Resurrection was the 2006 expansion, first on PSP and then on PS2, with more characters and a sharper look. A PS2 browser build was already listed. This update adds the PSP one.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is the 2000 arcade game, three characters a side, a jazz soundtrack, and a roster so wide that team-building became its own hobby. The listing is the PS2 version. It was never the prettiest port of that game. It was still the disc people put in when they wanted assists, team supers, and a round that made no sense to anyone watching.

Street Fighter Anniversary Collection is how a lot of PS2 owners finally got Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike at home, on the same disc as Hyper Street Fighter II. 3rd Strike had been the arcade and Dreamcast game, the one with the parries and the soundtrack people still hum. The collection was the convenient way to own it.

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3, from 2004, is the one the cel-shaded Budokai series had been building toward. You assembled a moveset out of skill capsules, and the fights were tighter than the first two. Budokai Tenkaichi 2, two years later, is a different game with a similar name: a huge roster, beam struggles, and arenas you could fly around until somebody punched you into a crater. The capsule builders stayed with Budokai. Everyone who wanted to be Goku for an hour went to Tenkaichi.

Battle Stadium D.O.N never left Japan. Eighting and Q Entertainment shipped it in July 2006, on PS2 and GameCube, and the initials are the whole pitch: Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto, the three Weekly Shonen Jump series, in one four-player pile-up. If you did not import it, you did not play it.

Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Impact is the 2011 PSP game, from the years when Shippuden was simply the show that was always on. It plays as an arena brawler, and the listing is that handheld edition. Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks is a co-op brawler from 2005, Liu Kang and Kung Lao between the first two tournaments, with the series' gore and a story that only sort of lines up with the arcade games. The native project was already here. The browser build is the new one.

Wrestling, then the street version

WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain, from 2003, is the SmackDown a lot of people still name first. Yuke's season mode, a roster caught between the Attitude Era and the period WWE was calling Ruthless Aggression, and a create-a-wrestler that could eat a whole evening. Def Jam: Fight for NY showed up in September 2004 and ran on a cousin of that wrestling feel, with rappers on the roster, New York as the map, and a story that walked you through the boroughs. Blaze was the one face who never left. Def Jam was already in the directory as a native project. The browser version is what just landed, and the page lists it under PS2.

WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011 is from 2010, once the series had Universe mode and a much heavier presentation on Xbox 360. The browser listing is the PSP edition, which was its own smaller game. The 360 project was already on the page.

Cars, bikes, and a skateboard

Burnout 3: Takedown landed in September 2004, and it is the Criterion game where the series clicked. A takedown was the point of a race. Crash mode was a second game hiding in the menu. Aftertouch let you steer the wreck after you had already lost. The soundtrack did as much work as the physics. The native recomp was already listed. The browser version is new.

Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition is Rockstar's 2005 street racer, the one with a city you could actually roam and a customization suite that borrowed its name from the magazine. The page here is the PSP edition. Tony Hawk's Underground 2 came out the year before and leaned all the way into the Jackass crossover: Bam Margera, a world tour made of dares, and a story mode some players loved and some players buttoned through. Classic mode was on the disc for anyone who just wanted the gaps back.

Downhill Domination, from 2003, is the sleeper. Incognito's mountain-bike racer played closer to SSX than to a simulation, with riders who had personalities and courses that were really obstacle courses. It never had the audience of the Hawk games. It is a good one to find again.

F1 06 is Studio Liverpool's game for the 2006 season, the year Renault and Fernando Alonso were the team to beat and Michael Schumacher was in his last Ferrari campaign before the later comeback. Sony released it in Europe, Australia, and Japan. It never got a US box. The listing is the PlayStation 2 version.

The annual football argument

The FIFA games in this batch are the PlayStation 2 editions, and that is the interesting part. By FIFA 10 in 2009, the game in the commercials lived on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. EA kept shipping a separate PS2 FIFA on the older engine anyway: FIFA 11, FIFA 12, FIFA 13, and FIFA 14, the last of them in 2013. Those were the discs you played when the PS2 was still the console in the house.

FIFA Street from 2005 is a different sport: EA Big's 4-on-4, the trick moves, the Gamebreakers. The 2012 reboot is already in the directory on its own page. This listing is the original. Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 on PSP is the other side of that era's argument. Konami's game was the one you picked when the feel of a pass mattered more than the league licenses. The page is the 2013 PSP edition.

Where they sit

The directory is already sorted with the newest games first, so this whole shelf is at the top. Browser ports narrows it to the kind of project these are. When a build asks for a disc, that file comes from a copy you own.